On the Aisle: Webcasts and Reviews

This week the full panel discuss the new thriller Mission Impossible Rogue Nation, the documentary Lego: A Brickumentary, the dramatization The Stanford Prison Experiment, the doc I Am Chris Farley, and the continuing Paul Thomas Anderson retro with his Boogie Nights, and two of his favorite films, Jackie Brown, and I Am Cuba, plus elsewhere […]

Continuing with its series of films released in the middle of a decade, the BFI Film Classics series leaps from The Birth of a Nation in 1915 to Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush in 1925. Though obviously there were many films in between (most of them now lost), the leap in technique and story clarity […]

Our trio today examines Pixels, the new Adam Sandler comedy; Unexpected, the feel-good pregnancy tale; the YA dramatization Paper Towns; and the true crime documentaries 3 1/2 Minutes Ten Bullets and Murder in the Park; and the documentary Do I Sound Gay?; and finally a look at the Paul Thomas Anderson retrospective.

This week, a trio of talkers discuss the new comedy Trainwreck; the Sherlock pastiche Mr. Holmes; the revenge drama Lila & Eve; a film shot wholely on a telephone, Tangerine, the 1924 restored documentary Epic of Everest; the contemporary documentary Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case; and the new BFI monograph on 1925’s Chaplin film, The Gold Rush.

As an observer of the movie world for many years, I’ve always found three subjects that were the least interesting: the Academy Awards, the red scare years or the blacklist, and censorship. These were subjects of sociological interest, not aesthetic. Magazines and academia seemed to thing we were more interested in these aspects of movies than […]

Today, the team takes on Minions, the Flaubert-inspired Gemma Bovary, the documentary Cartel Land and the Nicole Kidman vehicle Strangerland, the Leon Russell documentary A Poem Is a Naked Person, the rap history Rebel Kings, the British heritage WWI tale Testament of Youth, and Sweden’s You, the Living Later in the show we discuss (competing) podcasts. Here are the links: The snark-fest We […]

Among this week’s films are the comedy sequel Ted 2, the historical drama A Little Chaos, the millennial comedy The Overnight, Max (about a dog with PTSD), Fresh Dressed, about hip hop fashion, the Israeli comedy The Farewell Party, and Escobar: Paradise Lost, about the drug kingpin.

There’s no podcast this week, which means next week’s will be packed, but in the meantime have fun with this quiz from the Guardian, asking for your guesses on several movies with top casts whose titles you can’t remember.

This week the team looks at Jurassic World, the couples pix Love at First Fight, Results, and Hungry Hearts, the French film, Magic Men, part of the Jewish Film Fest, The Connection, and the documentary The Nightmare. And here is the answer to the show’s trivial question, care of Jordan Lewis, studio chief: “Trivia Question answer: In addition to Harrison […]